A few years ago, Tatianna Kantorowicz, an aspiring filmmaker in her 20s and a Columbia University graduate student living on the Upper East Side, wanted to make a movie about teenagers coming of age in Manhattan. She had come to New York by route of her native Bogotá, Colombia, and Swiss boarding school, and maintained an interest in those teenagers who seemed to inhabit the city free of the ceaseless parental ministrations that have come to define the current age. Eventually, she wrote a script and sent it to a producer, a young Wesleyan University graduate working in the world of independent film.

The producer, Danielle DiGiacomo, was not moved by what she initially read, she told me one evening last week, near her apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She had been working on a documentary about prison reform, which came to a halt when one of her subjects held her production partner at knifepoint in a Queens apartment.

Ms. Kantorowicz’s script seemed to lack authenticity. Then, in 2010, Ms. Kantorowicz met two boys outside a Barnes & Noble and introduced them to Ms. DiGiacomo, believing that a short film could be developed around their lives and the kind of feral independence with which they seemed to travel. Ms. DiGiacomo got to know them both, taking a particular maternal interest in one, Henry Wachtel.

“They weren’t rich. They were middle-class kids who had had troubled lives,” Ms. DiGiacomo said. The boys, Mr. Wachtel and Duncan Figurski, were best friends, students at Urban Academy, an alternative public high school on East 67th Street for children who had failed to flourish elsewhere. Both lived with single parents in tiny apartments, one in Midtown and the other on the Upper West Side. One lost his mother to cancer; the other was a child of divorce. Ms. DiGiacomo found Mr. Wachtel to be open, daring, dynamic and profoundly wounded, she told me, a boy with a hardened exterior and a deeply good heart.

“I thought he was a brilliant actor,” she said, “but he came from a home where no one had really supported his talent.”

His mother, Karyn Kay, was herself skeptical about her son’s abilities, Ms. DiGiacomo said, but in so many ways seemed to her a kind and generous woman grateful for the sort of tutelage and guidance Ms. DiGiacomo sought to offer. When Ms. DiGiacomo’s husband, lacking health insurance, experienced a freakish accident not long ago — his nose was bitten off by the couple’s rescue dog — Ms. Kay contributed to funds raised to pay the couple’s medical bills and encouraged her friends to do so as well.

On Wednesday, Mr. Wachtel, now 19, was arraigned in Manhattan on a second-degree murder charge, accused of beating his mother to death in their West 55th Street apartment the previous day. Ms. Kay, a teacher at LaGuardia, the performing arts high school, who had worked intermittently as a screenwriter, had called 911 on Tuesday during an epileptic seizure her son was enduring.

Photo

Larry Clark’s “Kids.”Credit
Miramax/Photofest

Court records indicate the tenor of the call quickly changed as it became evident that Mr. Wachtel was proceeding toward his mother violently. At one point, he is heard expressing horror and pleading for his mother to live. His lawyer, Lloyd Epstein, suggested that the attack was precipitated by medication Mr. Wachtel was taking for epilepsy.

The film that resulted from Ms. DiGiacomo’s collaboration with Ms. Kantorowicz is an exercise in cinéma vérité that cast Mr. Wachtel and Mr. Figurski in the leading roles. Titled “Our Time,” it was shot over a week, largely in Central Park on a budget of $15,000, and made its debut among many short films at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

While the details of the plot (such as it is) are fictionalized, the film seeks to convey the alienation and despair of a demographic rarely given much reflection in depictions of New York life — the children of families, neither affluent nor impoverished, for whom the high SAT score, the summer trip to Shanghai, the ethic of relentless achievement belong to a universe at once in view but infinitely distant.

In the film, Mr. Wachtel’s character is shown shaving his head with the idea of joining the Marines, because, as he says, college isn’t really an option and jobs, in the current climate, are unattainable. The story is propelled by an encounter the two boys have with a teenage girl wandering about aimlessly in Central Park, who experiences a seizure. A vague nihilism keeps them from behaving as responsibly as they could. No parents are present save for a father drunkenly passed out in a small living room in the film’s opening sequence.

The film’s most obvious cultural referent is the photographer Larry Clark’s 1995 film, “Kids,” a portrait of lost, downtown teenagers who engage in perilous forms of recreation at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Despite its pretenses to art, “Kids” delivers a strident message intended to produce hysteria. It is a morality tale about what happens in the absence of parental vigilance, the kind of story that no matter how hyperbolic, could easily move the mother or father of an enigmatic 15-year-old to install continuous home surveillance.

Before “Our Time” was shot, Ms. DiGiacomo showed Mr. Wachtel and Mr. Figurski Mr. Clark’s film, and they responded to its portrayal of teenage life in New York as real and true, she said. “ ‘This is our life, ’ they said.”

How closely their own experiences actually hewed to Mr. Clark’s bleak vision is hard to know. And having seen “Our Time,” it is impossible, for now, to view Mr. Wachtel’s tragedy apart from the life that film suggests — one in which parents are absent, opportunities seem meager and the resulting freedoms feel joyless in the wake of so much anxiety about a precarious future.

Ms. DiGiacomo said she saw no evidence of a violent underside to Mr. Wachtel’s character. But, she said he told her, he always feared he would amount to nothing. Would all the parental monitoring in the world have made a difference?

E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2012, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Killing, And Queries About a Life. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe